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Thursday, 3 March 2016

Review - '11.22.63', Episode 2 - 'The Killing Floor'

The first episode
of 11.22.63 took the audience on something of a winding path,
as it worked to establish the show's basic premise, and introduce us
to its protagonist, Jake Epping (James Franco). While it may have
lacked a clear sense of focus, overall, it was an episode that still
managed to do a great job of indicating where the story was headed in
the future - and, there was definitely a lot to enjoy about Jake's
early experiences in 1960.

The episode also
gave us a fairly clear idea of exactly how difficult Jake's mission
to prevent the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy might
prove to be - not just in terms of the three year commitment it would
require for Jake to even reach that point in history, or the complex
web of conspiracies he will be required to sort through, but also in
the fact that the past just doesn't want to be changed. Time, itself,
is working against Jake in a manner that feels distinctly
supernatural - and, innocent people have already died, as a result.

By the end of that
first episode, in fact, things had already got so out of hand for
Jake that he was, basically, forced to admit defeat - abandoning his
mission and setting out for the portal which would return him to the
present. On the way, though, Jake came up with an alternate plan - a
smaller change he could try to make that would benefit someone that
he cares for. And, it is here that the second episode of 11.22.63
begins.

In the previous
episode, we briefly met Harry Dunning (Leon Rippy), a student of an
adult education class taught be Jake whose family had been murdered
when he was a child. With that brutal murder set to take place on
Halloween, in 1960, Jake realises that he is in the perfect position
to try to stop it.

Even on a series
set to tell its tale over only eight episodes, it was probably
inevitable that there would still be room for the occasionally
diversion into self-contained side-plots - and, that is exactly what
this episode is. Jake's efforts, here, may feel smaller in scale than
his efforts to sort through the various conspiracies surrounding
JFK's assassination, but it is also clear that his new mission is
much more personal, in nature. From the moment that Jake arrives in
that small town, the episode finds a much clearer sense of focus in
its self-contained situation.

It is, also, a
situation that allows for some fantastically tense moments between
Jake and Frank Dunning (Josh Duhamel) - the man who will soon murder
his estranged family. Right from the start, Frank's unpleasantness,
and his generally threatening demeanour, is played very strongly - so
much so that the audience may, almost immediately, begin to fear for
Jake's safety. Frank is clearly abusive toward his estranged wife,
Doris (Joanna Douglas), and he obviously delights in the idea of
intimidating Jake, himself. The whole sequence in which Frank and his
friends take Jake on a trip to the slaughter-house at which Frank
used to work was especially tense - with the threat of violence
seeming almost inevitable, despite Frank's seemingly jovial nature.
The fact that that moment of violence, when it did present itself,
was to be directed at a cow, rather than Jake, almost felt like a
relief - though, the stand-off that ensued, as Frank tried to subject
Jake to something of a 'test of character', was still very effective.

If anything,
though, Frank's overall aggressive demeanour might have actually been
played a little too strongly during these scenes - to such an extent
that I found myself wondering if there was some twist in store, and
that the murderer might be revealed as someone else entirely. It just
seemed a little too obvious - though, at the same time, it is also
difficult to deny that Josh Duhamel was great in the role. Arguably,
we learned everything we needed to know about Frank Dunning from that
performance (that he was, for example, an abusive thug who felt that
he was better than the people around him). It may be true that the
episode didn't really delve too deeply into who Frank Dunning
actually was, beyond that exterior - but, arguably, it didn't really
need to.

As the young
version of the sad, and clearly damaged, man that we met in the
previous episode, Jack Fulton also does a remarkable job of bringing
Harry Dunning to life. The whole sequence, which he is chased down by
bullies then first to walk through town without his pants, was
obviously intended to make the audience sympathise with him - but, it
worked. Along with Joanna Douglas's brief time, on screen, as Frank's
abused wife, the two manage to clearly convey the true stakes of what
Jake is trying to achieve. Doris's other two children are,
admittedly, treated more like extras - though, I suppose that
screen-time needs to be conserved, somehow.

Of course, the real
question was whether Jake would be able to bring himself to do what
he felt he needed to do in order to save Doris and her children -
along with the equally important issue of whether he would actually
be able to change the past. While Time didn't push back against Jake
in any way as overt as what we saw in the previous episode, the idea
that it might have been responsible for Jake's food poisoning was a
development which managed to be both funny and disturbing (this,
along with the implications that Al's cancer might have been the
result of his own attempts to meddle with the past, gives some fairly
unpleasent implications for what Jake might truly be up against, in
this regard).

As compelling as
all of this was, though, the episode's true high-light actually came
from somewhere else, entirely - with Arliss Price (Michael O'Neill),
from whom Jake is renting a spare room while he is in town, telling
the story of how he earned his Bronze Cross during the second World
War. It was a fantastic sequence, featuring some great acting from
both Michael O'Neill and James Franco, which proved that sometimes
'telling' seems to work just as well as 'showing' - since, as strange as it may sound, I'm actually convinced that a flash-back, to show us this moment in action, wouldn't have been nearly as effective. It was a wonderfully dramatic moment
which also managed to provide a fascinating parallel to Jake's own
dilemma in this episode. Also, as a side-note, Jake claiming that he served in the Korean war as part of the 4077th MASH unit, only moments earlier, was another great moment - though, obviously, for entirely different reasons.

Obviously, with
only eight episode, 11.22.63 can't afford to spend too much
time being diverted into episodic side-plots. Eventually, the series
is going to have to focus entirely on Jake's overall mission. Though,
given the quality of this episode, that almost seems like a shame. By
the end of the first episode, I still wasn't entirely convinced that
the central 'JFK' plot-line would be worth following - and, by
pushing that aside entirely here, this episode hasn't really helped,
in that regard. But, as a self-contained story, this episode of
11.22.63 was definitely a success.